


finding rain in the dust

by sade12



Series: old beginnings [1]
Category: The Ritual (2017)
Genre: Also pre-Rob's death, Infidelity, Jealousy, M/M, Moodiness on Dom's end... the man's entire personality is a symptom of postmodernity, Pre-Forest portion in the form... of backstory, Slight canon deviation, There's no stories on here that feature Dom but I get that ykwim, non-con elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 06:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19969609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sade12/pseuds/sade12
Summary: Dom brings up the past and shines twelve million ultraviolet spotlights on it.(Other things in the notes, please read them!)





	finding rain in the dust

**Author's Note:**

> This originally started as a bit of character study. I wanted to try out writing Dom-style dialogue which I need to admit was FUN beyond belief, and I dropped it for a while thinking that was all it needed to be... until one day sniffing through Netflix I noticed that they, briefly, changed The Ritual's vertical cover to— forgive me if this link doesn't work and please tell me if it does not— [this.](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/3d516934-1830-4112-a1d4-3f3aa4346e7e/ddcg7hp-544deb0a-60fa-4d1f-9cbb-cb05ce723a28.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzNkNTE2OTM0LTE4MzAtNDExMi1hMWQ0LTNmM2FhNDM0NmU3ZVwvZGRjZzdocC01NDRkZWIwYS02MGZhLTRkMWYtOWNiYi1jYjA1Y2U3MjNhMjgucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.1NaOboA9tAT89mYGxt8VIw_IzVAG2Z2MPWo5v6hp_Gw)  
> And I found that really, profoundly interesting, and not on an "aww!" level, on a level of character analysis and relationship analysis that flew over my head all of the three times I watched the movie. I realized that their relationship and interactions were much more important than I estimated them to be. I thought, not Rob? Not even Moder? Dom, of all people?
> 
> And... here we are. Dom might have actually the first person first affected by Moder when they got into the country, after all- read, his leg. If her influence extends that far outside the forest?... jajajaja you didn't come here for my interpretations though. Have this little bit I wrote, and I hope dearly that you enjoy it. Feedback and kudos are well appreciated, have a wondrous day and night... xo. * Oh, one more thing I feel I should mention: this has a lot of headcanons throughout; I tried to make them subtle...  
> I do believe I needn't call Reference to Dom's sleeping bag line mmm? We're all on the same page here with that?
> 
> (I read an article, by the way, suggesting the only reason to watch The Ritual was its' monster design and that is the worst take I've ever seen. It has the best dialogue out of everything I've ever seen on Netflix. Run and tell that.)

He’s whispering.  
  
He is whispering in that way where he does not quite really whisper, voice merely shriller while still carrying all the bombast of his outdoor voice. Dom is, as has been observed by many a friend and many an analyst, incapable of doing a lot of things the way fully rational people might; the world must accord to his clock and he’s constantly changing the hours backward and forward. Pretentious, mouthy prick is ‘whispering’ again and though it’s hushed enough to keep Hutch and Phil sufficiently out of the loop the sound is booming in Luke’s head, soundwaves of pure iron and steel.  
  
There is a patch of wet coming from the ceiling where there’s a leak, the puddle is adjacent to Luke’s face and every fourth or so drop some water will get on his closest eyebrow. The dark corner of the room he’s staring at appears to fluctuate its shape, he occasionally sees bright bulbs of color shifting in and out of the wall and moving across his vision should he look at them directly. His hands knit together inside of his sleeping bag as hands over the covers wasn’t enforced in his childhood home. It’s weird, thinking of a place like that in circumstances like this; to be thinking of the fireplace while drudging though the snow.  
  
“Oh Lukey-boy,” Dom hums.  
  
Silence, with the exception of the rain’s pattering.  
  
"You can- you can knock it off, you know,” Dom continues nonchalantly, a laugh under his breath. “I know you’re awake in there. You sleep worse than I do.”  
  
But even Dom, of all people, has an event horizon line where he realizes and yields to the futility of a situation. If Luke doesn’t move, keeps his body straight and flat—  
  
 _“Ground control to Major Luke.”_  
  
Or that can happen.  
  
 _“Grab your cigarettes and pull both your boots oooon._ Swoop. Like that. Bet that’s the sound those pieces of shit are making at this point, anyway. See, ah, but I _told_ you I’d buy you some boots. _Guess_ who said no. _Guess_ who said no to that. Guess who had his _dad’s_ pair.”  
  
A giggle comes down the bridge of Luke’s nose before he can stop it, his shoulders rise and fall. He swallows the shame of hearing Dom patting himself on the back for that, washing himself in praise, a barrage of _‘I knew it’_ s.  
  
 _“Check ignition, and may the map take us..._ fucking _somewheeeere._ Don’t even care where. Christ. Sweden. What the _fuck_ are we doing in Sweden.”  
  
“Amen to that,” Luke says, voice meek under the rain. “And they’re not my dad’s. The, uh... the soles are wearing out though, yeah. They are squeaking weird.”  
  
“I heard. ’M a bit more observant than you think, Lukey-boy.”  
  
A certain tiredness, bone-deep and massive sitting in his core, leaks onto Luke’s voice as he says “What is it, Dom?”  
  
And he is that tired, the sort of tired that can’t be remedied by mere sleep. It’s been this way for months, sitting around within him and taking up space that wouldn’t have been filled by anything better.  
  
“What, you can’t tell?” There’s the telltale sound of fabric rustling when Dom wings his arms out and drops them to his sides. Luke can picture it vividly. “I thought it was obvious.”  
  
“It’s not. Sorry I’m not observant as you.”  
  
“Hey, quick question. Do you get mad when I call you that? Is that, like, a Hutch-only thing?”  
  
“I’d like if it was a nobody thing.”  
  
“Oh, so it’s a Hutch-only thing. Okay. Got it, yeah.”  
  
Thunder turns in the distance, Luke giggles noncommittally. “Night, Dom.”  
  
“Why’s Hutch so special, do you think, eh? Have you ever thought about the fact that he’s, like, the golden mantelpiece of our friend group?”  
  
“I don’t know, he’s... leaderly, so when we do stuff like this, it’s- I mean it just makes sense, you know? He’s got more direction than the rest of us put together.”  
  
“Oh, God. You can kiss his ass, but you don’t have to make out with it.”  
  
“Really, he’s- he’s really better at this than the rest of us. He was in, uh... team coordination, remember?”  
  
 _“He was in coordination,”_ Dom mimics, voice hardly concealing a telling scoff. “Sure, but we fucking... idolize the man, yeah? And what’s it about? Don’t get me wrong, though- bless his heart, bless his side of the family even though I can never make out what the _fuck_ they’re saying, fucking Scots-” Luke snorts at that- “but I’m saying—”  
  
“Dom. _Dom.”_  
  
“—there’s Hutch-only privileges. Do _I_ get privileges? Sure I do! If getting called a fat fuck and being told I was never in the Scouts is fucking _privi_ leges. Yeah, three _fucking_ cheers there, fucking—”  
  
“Wha-? No one’s calling you a-”  
  
“—and- hey, and I _was_ in the Scouts, for your information. Got all the badges still. Hell, got a... I got scars on my stomach somewhere from when I put ‘em on by myself with my fat fuck sausage fingers and pinned _right_ through the fucking sash. Right through it.”  
  
“...Dom. Dom. Okay. Dom, look at me. You did not wake me up just for this, right?”  
  
Stirred by an irksome force, Luke raises up at the waist and holds himself upright with his elbows. He pictures a sledgehammer crashing down into whatever remains of his sense of ease as a migraine comes on, and that one complacent grin that’s trademark of Dom stretches across his face. His _‘I won’_ look.  
Meanwhile Luke is uncomfortable and the feeling is growing in amplitude, a lone moment with Dom has more layers than any other ordinary awkward interaction between old-friends-turned-strangers. The past comes up. He wishes it didn’t, but the past comes up.  
  
Dom is incapable of sticking to a single subject, he’s always been, but as the years have passed and he’s needed to switch from contacts to permanent glasses he’s only unraveled further at a steady pace.  
Something lurks and ekes into his words the longer their conversations run if they should talk long, something outlandish. A storm closes in over his eyes and makes them darker.  
  
The closest memory is a strange, hurtling phone call from last year that began with Dom rambling about heating costs, then the fact he still gets newsletters from assorted social clubs he no longer visits, then Zoroastrianism, and once Luke was actually getting into the conversation Dom tore the bandage off and asked if he remembered a specific college-era memory, weakly admitting that was all he called to talk about.  
  
“No. Genius,” Dom says. He adds the last word abruptly, a nervous-sounding chuckle coming out with it. His eyes dart to the left.  
  
“So why wake me up? Why not-?”  
  
Luke knows why, is the thing. Dom won’t say it aloud. They both know why.  
  
Any opportunity he gets, including ones he has to make, are good enough to spur up a faux-impromptu dwelling on their shared past. It _almost,_ and that is a gracious almost, feels like Dom does it to apologize in some strange way- but not by apologizing, only acknowledging and never letting the events die.  
  
Luke is in no mood to be tortured with this so he breaks eye contact, mumbles a forced ‘goodnight’ and is self-compacting back into his sleeping bag. He almost has the zipper over his head when Dom halts him, somehow having had crawled to this side of the room incredibly quickly in full spite of his supposedly fucked meniscus, then wrenching his hands inside and grabbing at what he can.  
  
“Hey. Hey. Okay, I know how this looks, but wait. Listen.”  
  
“You do this every time you- let go. Let go of me. Dom, let g- let go of me.”  
  
“I know, I know I do, but I can’t— look, every time she asks me why I’m calling you at six in the fucking morning, you of all fucking people- _‘Who’s that, Dominic?’_ I- it’s fucking killing me. Bet she thinks I’m cheating, huh?”  
  
“It’s been four years,” Luke says, voice low yet pushing intensity. “Four _fucking-”_  
  
Very evasively, Dom is referring to one of his higher moments of college.  
  
An astonishingly prosperous day that bore nothing in relation to the other desolate and mediocre days which composed his life— a staggering promotion, a pardon to a large lump of medical debt regarding an age-old leg injury. A decent drink at his favorite pub which left him just drunk enough for the empathetic side of Luke to offer to wait with him for his ride.  
He was visually happy, a strong glow from the streetlamp above that yellowed his eyes and oranged his face. Happier than he ever had a tendency of looking, anyway- he could be cross, he could be jaded or blatantly adversarial, but this was the first grin in some time that hadn’t come at the misfortune of himself or others.  
  
“Cab’s taking a while. Do you think I should’ve called Uber instead?”  
  
Luke realized he’d been staring and looked away. “Nah, I think there’s just traffic that way. You can hear the sirens and that.”  
  
Dom nodded and gave him a nudge shortly afterward. “Hey. How, uh... how many days now?”  
  
“Fifteen.”  
  
 _“No._ You’re serious?”  
  
“Yeah. Uh, making... some progress there, I guess.”  
  
“You _guess?_ Psssh. Cheer up a little. That’s good, Luke. That’s really, really good. You’re doing great. Fifteen more and it’ll be like you’ve never seen a cigarette in your life.”  
  
“Ahhh, yeah. Exactly. Like you’ve never seen a glass of whiskey, I bet?”  
  
“Oh, piss off. It’s not like- I didn’t _jump_ off the wagon, okay? Got knocked off it.”  
  
“Should’ve been holding on, then.”  
  
“Not that simple. You should know, ey? What was your record streak, again? What happened there?”  
  
Luke _tch_ ’d and rolled his eyes.  
  
“But according to _you,_ Mr. Nicotine Patch, right, expert in all addictions, all we’ve gotta do is stop drinking and the rest of this shit will fall into place on it’s own. That's all it is, isn't it? The whole five year plan?”  
  
“Never said that, Dom. Just remember that a cold turkey is the best kind.”  
  
“Witches’ tit, yep. Might go vegan instead. Now, see, that fixes two problems at once. Might even start drinking kosher wine. You know they make that?”

“You're really gonna swap out whiskey for kosher wine.”

Dom's shrug is comically large.

“You're a dumbass, Dom.”

“I'm an innovator.” To enunciate this, he parades in a small circle in a way nigh gallant; “A, fucking, _innovator._ Changing the game theory."

“Getting red cards.”

“...Where necessary. Sports are for people that don't need fucking _canes._ They said this was temporary, but I'm fucking... You know how many kids have offered me seats since I got this thing?”

“Try not to sprain that, eh? I'm not loading your sorry arse into the car.”

“Hey, hey. Wait. Idea. Brainchild. Just had one. Hear me out. How about... we go find some wine?”

“It's not kosher anymore?”

“Ah, shit. I thought you wouldn't notice.”  
  
“Maybe you should call that Uber,” Luke murmured to himself, eyes on his watch, eyebrows low. “It’s... late as fuck, she’s gonna be wondering what’s taking you.”  
  
“Yeah, maybe.” For a while after this, Luke watched the reflection of his apps dance on his glasses- and he noticed that he never once tapped, much less got near Uber. He chalked this up to insobriety and let it pass. “And what about you?”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“Anyone at home?”  
  
“...My... bed.”  
  
“Riiiighto, like I figured. And who’s in the bed?”  
  
“Not me,” Luke said with much heavier emphasis, shoving his fists into his pockets. “What about it?”  
  
“You know, I ought to get you seeing somebody. _You_ ought to get you seeing somebody, what, out here spending the best years of your life alone? Fucking travesty. Travesty.”  
  
“I think I have a good enough time when I’m not babysitting one of you lot, thanks. Just call an Uber already.”  
  
“Travesty for everyone else,” Dom said then, voice underlined by a chuckle. Going on, he looked up to meet his eyes- “Really, what’s with the, uh, celibacy, eh? What’s the plan, who’s it for?”  
  
“Uh, there _is_ no plan, as I _clearly_ just fucking said...? Mate, you’re- look, you’re not even in the app. Fuck’s sake. I’ll call it myself, it’s fucking cold out here.”  
  
“You could hold one down just fine. Luke, if I know anything about you, it’s that when you’re not acting up- as you do, annoyingly, when it suits ya- you’re the most reasonable man of all of us. Upstanding. Fine piece of work. Hell, I’m a walking car accident compared to you. I’m fucking _horrific_ in almost _every_ conceivable fucking way, right?”  
  
That all sounded odd from a smiling pair of lips, but odder still was “How in the fuck did I even meet her, do you think? Did the universe just, what, up and decide I wasn’t getting my fair share? Hah, what’d I do to deserve that? Like today. _Today._ All this is really, really too good to be true. What the _fuck._ Kind of expecting that, like, to balance it out the cab won’t come and I’ll have to walk home or something? Probably get mugged on the way? Ain’t that how that, uh, karma stuff works?”  
  
“You’re... smashed,” Luke consoled himself by saying. The driver read seven minutes away. “Absolutely wasted.”  
  
“No I’m not,” Dom stepped in, pocketing his phone and meeting Luke’s gaze properly. “I’m thinking clearly, okay? Fully calibrated over here. Wholly cogent. I’m serious.”  
  
“Leave it.”  
  
“No. Come on. What is it?”  
  
“I’m busy and I’m not fucking looking either, okay? Hard to sit down with any of that kind of shit when you're being racketed between two jobs, and I don't even- look, I don't care. But as for you, Dom, maybe instead of drinking till three in the morn you ought to start planning where you’re having your wedding. Fu- fuck’s sake, okay? What are you even-? What’re you on about?” Nervous laugh, unsteady words.  
  
“I _am_ thinking about it, excuse you. She wants, like... Greece, or some shit, I’m thinking up there where it’s cold, or... some fucking thing. ‘Know I _hate_ the cold? I hate the cold and I’m thinking then of Iceland which of course is the most sensible thing, obviously. _Land Of The Atheists With Volcanoes And No Trees_ and that, and I made a joke about that around her or something and of course she fucking hates the whole notion so it’s dropkicked and she in _sists_ upon warm. Warm, warm, warmth. Fine, so fucking be it, yeah? Gotta be _warm_ places out there the alimony covers. So, see. My second choice _was_ somewhere warm, memorable, yeah? One of those hot Asian countries with the fancy relics and that. But then she says _Greece?_ Wow, _okay. Alright._ Just bounce over from atheists to anarchists. Don’t want a burning cocktail in my cake nor my gob, although that does sound like it’d be a name for a good drink, eh?” The way he then, without missing a beat, jumped to a completely alternative topic then was staggering: “I like the way you go about things, you know what I mean? We’re from the same kin of generalized asshole, but you’re more here. Your head’s _here._ Yeah. You know, like it's present. It’s _present._ ‘Like that. Always liked that.”  
  
“Dom?”  
  
“Get what I’m saying?”  
  
“I— no, no. I don’t. I- no. No I don’t, no.”  
  
His broad smile didn’t change as much as it became a different kind of smile. “I’m trying to say I like you, dumb fuck. Come on.”  
  
“You’re...” Luke needs what feels like an eon to formulate his response, picturing himself aging grotesquely as those words slow cook in his mind. “Uh... you’re... literally fucking— _literally,_ literally engaged, Dominic.”  
  
“Yeah. Didn’t forget. So? Can’t afford the car, but I can say it looks nice. Relax.”  
  
“No, you’re- no, you’re fucking _engaged,_ Dom. An ho- an hour ago you were talking about– honeymooning and, and shit, what- you’re _engaged,_ you- the fuck-? You were _just_ talking about-”  
  
It was Dom that grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him forward, it was Dom that smashed their lips together in an abrupt kiss that left both of them equally frazzled. Luke’s hollow, empty look was reflected by an almost wild one in Dom’s eyes paired with a smile too wide to be real.  
  
The second one, a weak grasp at reconcile, a hand on his nape just over the veins in his neck that throbbed to the speed of his racing pulse. Fingers sliding into his hair, more stability, markedly more tender. Slower. It didn’t make a sound.  
  
After a bleak span of staring between the two, sirens distant and blaring over the occasional yell, blasting of music or honks resounding and each of the white breaths leaving Luke’s mouth- though he could have sworn he was not breathing- Dom closed in again. A kiss more ‘proper’ by someone else’s imagination of the word. Backed by sidewalk chatter and careless gadding from inside the bar, this kept happening until each remaining minute lapsed and a car pulled up with a soft halt.  
  
Luke got home at some point but could not for the life of him be depended upon to articulate what happened in the time between underneath that streetlight and his front door accurately.  
He showered for an hour but still was not clean, much less did the face reflecting his in the cabinet mirror seem to be his. A long moment of jaunty disassociation that his meds wouldn’t have fixed anyway, so he did not bother. He wishes he'd asked someone else to hide his old cigarette case, or just burn the thing.  
  
By the time he woke it hadn’t happened, just another buzzed memory faded into soft obscurity- until the next time Dom got sufficiently smashed again, promising only a light beer— “I mean, we’re in the neighborhood, Lukey-boy, aren’t we? Huh? More a side-step than a detour, really.”— and then drinking himself stupid.

Luke, the dutiful sitter, listened to his animated ramblings for two hours until he was abruptly being fawned over for ‘kissing better’. Completely unprompted.  
  
Dom was very difficult to shove off in the cramp and chafe of a leather booth, trying artlessly to peck at his chin, calling him the loveliest girl he’s ever seen. They got some stares for that.  
  
He never told Gayle, though he figures he probably should have. He also never responded to the wedding invitation he had gotten hardly a month later and Dom, inexplicably, took it as a personal insult.  
  
And the years trudged on from there in a slow death march.  
  
The details of these happenings, all several of their occurrences, are so smeared now; he’d forgotten them on a surface level yet internalized them deeply, stowed in those deep expanses of sorrow where sunlight can never reach. In simple terms, he had chosen to forget.  
  
Yet as that is, he clears his throat eight times a minute whenever alone with Dom in a elevator and can’t keep himself still, frantically sliding through his feed while digesting nothing; his flinches are absurdly large whenever mid-laugh he’s clapped on the back. When he’s declined group outings in the past under the guise of some improbable last-second stomach ache, it’s because, and though this could be paranoia talking, it’s only ever the seat next to Dom that’s open.  
  
He had chosen to forget, but it permeates the background of his mind so unerringly that if a complete stranger were to stroll up to him in the midst of working hours and casually ask _'So, have you forgiven Dominic yet?'_ he would have an answer readymade and in the wings. _“Yeah, um,”_ he might begin, hand fondling the back of his neck as he searches for the right words, _“about that, yeah. I, I’m really– but I still don’t know... yet. I’m thinking about it, um, I mean. Cause I’ve known him for years and I still can’t really... It’s just, shit, I couldn’t just up and not be his fri—”_ He would then look up and be seized by the realization this person is nobody he knows, he would blink at them several times in rapid succession, and lastly abscond to the bathroom and retch for a half-hour.  
  
Luke remembers another time as well, while his shoulders were hiked up almost to his ears as he sat waiting at the bar on their drinks, the quick glances he’d make behind himself. This was different, some several vague months after the first occurrence of Dom’s gravitas, and he would look behind himself and see the man sitting there with a slight slouch. Hands clasped and head tilted enough to enunciate the look in his eyes, barely restrained by his glasses. Put eloquently, Luke remembers those eyes settling again on his nape- or his forehead, when he turned; he remembers being eye-fucked across the bar. He remembers that low, implying look.  
  
Then Phil and Rob came in, both courteously late, and the look evaporated.  
  
But as with all evaporation, rain is being created and it shall fall elsewhere. Another time, another circumstance. Far above the sculpted mountains, pounding away at some decrepit and weather-worn house in the deepest clutches of Sweden’s soggy beauty and drowning out this conversation.  
  
“Why now?” Luke asks, voice nearly a whine as he frets, although Dom bears too much weight for him to move. “Why- why’re- why’s- why’re you bringing this up? Why now? Why _now?”_  
  
“You made me remember. Just now, that thing about... Hutch-only... privileges, I don’t— you don’t- you, you’re— not into him, yeah?”  
  
 _This conversation!_ One to be had. The pause is galling; this clean, hyperpresent pause, this staring wherein the white patches of breath sheeting Dom’s glasses reflect the bemusement deep within Luke’s eyes; all of creation slithers past, ten million unsaid sentences, maybe more. A smooth glide from one conversational hurdle to the next, and at this one they stay staunchly blockaded.  
  
How strange.  
  
“Me being _into-?”_  
  
“I mean. Yeah.”  
  
“You do know he’s, he’s married too? He’s married too? Just like you are?”  
  
How strange it feels to whisper-yell a conversation like this. Hutch snores in the background lavishly unaware and the sound nearly meets the volume of the rain.  
  
“Yeah? Yeah I’m married, what? What of it? C’mon, go on, tell me off. What of it, huh? What of it? I can’t ask you a question?”  
  
The fabric of the sleeping bag crunches as Dom swings his un-fucked leg over to the other side, effectively keeping Luke straddled down against the unforgiving wood beneath them. Gravity tolls and his glasses slide off, they hit Luke’s nose. In sickly unison they both breathe much too hard. Chests heave and they’re _loud,_ so loud. Dom is panting from overexertion. Luke is panting because he left his anxiety meds at home and he’s not looking forward to having to deal with the aftershocks of this.  
  
And his hands shake when he’s pushing the glasses by their rim back up onto the bridge of his nose, but they slack down a second time.  
  
He keeps trying, though. A long pause, several more attempts to right his glasses on his sweat-slicked face until Dom just swats his hand back down with a mumbled ‘leave it’, then rumbling out a sigh that could break mountains in two as aptly as any hammers.

“You, you’d have a problem with- with, with that? Me, if I liked Hu-” Hypothetical. These words do not see completion. His voice fades out meekly.  
  
“Yeah I’d have- yeah, no, yeah I’d have a _problem_ with that. Duh. No fucking shit. Liked you for six and a half _years,_ you dumb fuck,” Dom begins to admonish, though his tone lacks anything admonishing in it. There is something in his furrowed eyebrows that loudly professes that up until this point this conversation had been mostly following an orderly shower-rehearsed script, some rough conceptual planning, but only just now did the ink start to bleed through and ruin all pages before and after. No response is given, but the following is thrown on just to have the last word more definitively: “You stupid, _stupid,_ stupid dumb fucking stupid fuck. Okay?”  
  
Luke gawks at him, eyes like plates, confused.  
  
There is silence ahead, and a deathly still. Dom, irritated— but also growing colder, unwilling to limp-crawl back to his sleeping bag and drag it over— just lets his body slack until he is draped over Luke, head leaning heavy against his.  
  
Foreheads touch. They both stay up for at least an hour more in silence, or at least until the point at which their breathing doesn’t thunder quite so hard and falls into sync. When the rain sounds to be thinning, another cloud billows over with a harsher torrent and the leaks worsen. When he sits up, Luke can’t keep his hands steady enough to light the cigarette that materialized in his mouth. Dom’s head slides down with his motion.  
  
Speaking to nobody, Luke stutters: “I’m freaking out. Freaking out.”  
  
Dom was not raised with any certain nest egg for the future, had no inviolable trust-fund parachute but has always responded to failures on his own part as if he did. So is to say, rejection makes him prissy; every setback, as is his honest belief, will spiral him into complete destitution— this has never happened and nor will it ever. Yet he continues to floor the pedals with the thinking that the only way is the fast way.  
  
And here, Dominic’s face, which typically externalizes everything that he’s thinking plus some, is horrifically flat. It feels unrealistic, like a caricature artist had his face in mind but not his personality; indeed, also unlike himself, he takes both sides of Luke’s face and moves upward until his fingers are treading through the gossamer, damp wisps of his hair with admiration.  
  
He mutters some kind of promise that _this is the last time_ as he pulls their faces together.  
The cigarette tumbles and rolls into the puddle, the kiss makes a noise, and this far out from the land of reason Luke lets himself yield, allows Dom what he wants. Eyes drift shut, his arms loosen with the waves that pass over him.  
  
A pause for air. It was long.  
  
Luke feels himself crying, but that could possibly also be a leak from above strategically implemented by the universe. There’s a tapping of water hitting the crown of his head and he really isn’t sure what has driven him to cry. It might not be all of this specifically, there’s much to cry about in both his life and the world as a whole. Might just be overdue. Dom is looking at him how a helpless driver might look at the cat they’d accidentally hit, eyebrows knit and lips upcurling with grief.  
  
“No, no. Come on, none of that,” he says drearily, voice glossed with exhaustion as he tugs Luke forward into a sitting-embrace sort of position, patting his back in this awkward, awful way that makes him want both to burst into side-splitting laughter and sob out all of his miseries from petty to magnificent. “Look, look. I’ll put it this way. Hutch was in... team coordination, I was in the fucking– having those impulse control sessions. And did it _work?_ Fucking look at me, mate. I— shhhh, hey. Hey, hey. Come on, now. It’s okay. S’alright. Shh. You, me, we’re okay. Heard that, Lucas? We’re okay.”  
  
 _Lucas_ is older than _Lukey-boy,_ but whereas the latter was made to get at him the former is real. _Lucas,_ what left of him exists today, is from before walls had been deconstructed by the Trojan horse of friendship which truthfully has burned nothing but sits there leering and utilizing a lot of manpower to regularly clean. It is painstakingly real, graphically real, nearly as real as _Dominic_ but not so. When his nose starts to run, he lets his head fall back. Vision inverted, he watches the stairs blur behind the tarp of tears.  
  
Classic Dominic has returned to everyone’s great chagrin, and in some deep, disturbed, lonesome and forlorn article of Luke’s self he wishes to be... touched, again, by the incarnation of him that reached out and touched his face.  
  
He tells himself this, lie as it is, as he throws his arms around Dom’s back and leans forward into him.  
  
As though... scripted, Luke ponders mid-deed, the rain’s volume heightens to bury the sounds of their mouths and his own shameless little noises that come from low places in his throat. As the warmth swells his layers clamp to his skin in a succession, glued that way by his sweat- such as would collect underneath the heat of, for example, a Greek summer. Nowhere cold. Nowhere Sweden.  
  
“I don’t– think— that you’re a– stupid fuck—” Dom strains breathlessly, because he never stops talking.


End file.
